Woman Sitting at a Table

Woman Sitting at a Table at the Milwaukee Art Museum, painted around 1910, shows Vuillard in the period of his social and artistic transition — his early Nabi radicalism long behind him, his mature style established, his social world expanded into the fashionable Parisian bourgeoisie. The subject itself — a woman at a table — remained among his most characteristic and recurrent, drawing on the domestic traditions of Chardin and Vermeer that he had studied and admired throughout his career. By 1910 his female subjects were as likely to be the wives of wealthy patrons as the women of his own modest apartment, and the changed social register gave his domestic subjects a different material richness — more elaborate furnishings, more costly objects on the table — without fundamentally altering his approach to treating figure and environment as equally weighted elements in a unified chromatic field. Milwaukee's French holdings, which include a notable range of Post-Impressionist work, were assembled during the mid-twentieth century as American regional museums began systematic engagement with the European modern tradition.

The table and its objects receive treatment as visually complex as the seated woman — Vuillard's democratic eye finding equal interest in reflective surfaces, tablecloth patterns, and the figure itself. His paint handling by 1910 is looser and more tonal than the early Nabi period, individual strokes larger and more varied in texture.